Deos Contemporary Ballet’s 2024-2025 season finale, Awaken 25, reflected the mood of our times, offered a balm via movement, and showed the small but mighty company’s artistic and stylistic range in the wonderfully intimate space of Gezon Auditorium at Calvin University.
With just five company dancers and three guest artists, Awaken 25 presented seven dances from eight different choreographers in three acts that each expressed a distinct mood and experience. From the fear and rage of Act I to the whimsy of Act II to the lullaby of Act III, the performance invited the audience to witness and move through a great variety of emotions and styles of movement, much of which was rooted in the lexicon of classical ballet.
One of the most compelling pieces of the entire show was “Schwanengesang”, a meditation on life and death choreographed by Leah Haggard and performed exquisitely by Isabelle Ramey. In this quietly riveting dance that is in conversation with Mikhail Fokine’s “The Dying Swan”, Ramey moved while rooted, emoting almost entirely from the waist up while wearing a black skirt pinned to the floor that covered more than half the stage.
This swan song was couched between the two most narrative pieces in the middle of the whimsical Act II: Darrell Haggard’s “Time-Out”, in which four dancers in pigtails and barrettes stomped, jumped, stuck out their tongues, threatened wet willies, and collapsed on the ground with reckless abandon as if children on the playground; and Grace Sinke’s “I am Weary”, a folksy mini story book ballet in which four women and Grand Rapids Ballet guest artist Nigel Tau performed with five rocking chairs a family drama in which a mother and her children cope with the loss of their patriarch. They dance to both spoken word and bluegrass to wonderful effect.
Act II offered a larger experience from birth to death with so many of the emotions surrounding each, from joy to grief. It was a welcome journey to follow the rage and fear of Act I. Each of the three dances here were in conversation with texts, from a 13th Century poem about grappling with having no control over one’s destiny to Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”, all of which are about transforming grief, often through destruction.
The melodrama of Act I was powerful, the tension in each dance palpable and undeniably beautiful. Dressed and lit in red and black, the shadows articulated as much as the bright white light of an overhead spot that opened and closed Ericka Goss’s “The Whirling Wheel”. From the modern expressivity of Katie Brown in Allison Haan’s “Lady Lazarus” to the lyrical and romantic grand jêtés and pirouettes from Leah Haggard in her lovely pas de deux with Nigel Tau in “The Whirling Wheel” to his marvelously connected pas de deux with Alison Haan in Madison Massara-Leister’s “Echoes of the Raven”, the inevitable push-pull of gripping conflict was center stage, both terrifying and lovely.
And Penelope Freeh and Hannah Sullivan’s “Pulse/Breath/Rise” provided the other bookend to Act I that completed the emotional journey with a lullaby. A premiere of three conjoined works set to an original guitar composition performed live by Jeremy Verwys, these three pas de deux in which all six dancers conjoin at particular moments offered the most modern movement of the performance in a way that was meditative if not, at times, sleepy. Though a burst of energy from both the dancers and the music at the end of the piece acted as something of a wake up call both figuratively and literally.
Altogether Awaken 25 added up to more than the sum of its provocative parts which individually might be disparate, but thoughtfully put together through Artistic Director Tess Sinke’s vision, not only told the story of our times, but gave the audience the experience of how to move through it. This is the power of dance as art, and Deos Contemporary Ballet has achieved it elegantly.
Awaken 25
Deos Contemporary Ballet
May 17
deosballet.com
